Saturday, March 21, 2009

SIDELINE: EGG #1

So, a cold virus has me a little behind this week with my review for The Last Metro, but I promise I will have it up as early as I can this coming week, with reviews of the rest of Criterion's March releases soon to follow.

In the meantime, I thought I'd point out that one of Criterion's main graphic designers, Eric Skillman, has just released his first comic. Owners of the Berlin Alexanderplatz boxed set might recognize the art style on this cover:

click for larger version

My editor at Oni Press, James Lucas Jones, grabbed me a copy at New York Comic-Con, and I just got my hands on it today. The book contains five crime stories, somewhat in an EC Comics/Alfred Hitchcock Presents vein: short pieces with a swift kick in the end. All the tales are drawn by different artists, all with different yet complementary styles tied together by the matching coloring approach. Artistically, there are shades of Paul Pope, Phil Noto, Mike Oeming, and the comics series Criminal, and yet every story is drawn with its own unique spin. If you like any of those other guys, you oughta like Egg, as well.

The lead story in Egg, "These Kids Today..." is drawn by Connor Willumsen and is slated for publication in Popgun, Volume 3, coming out at the end of March from Image Comics. Joëlle Jones and I also have a story in that book, a pulpy boxing number called "The Jailhouse Swing," colored by the amazing Laura Allred. Here is the opening page:

Crime is a popular subject around here, and Joëlle and I have two more stories on the way featuring the criminal element. One is "Gone Doggy Gone" in the anthology Portland Noir, a collection of stories set in our homebase of Portland, Oregon. Ours is the only comic-book story in the anthology. (See some art here.)

Next is our full-length take on the old-school private detective genre, the graphic novel You Have Killed Me, coming from Oni Press in May. Click on the image below for more information.

We're both really proud of You Have Killed Me. I just received the first lettering proof today. By no small coincidence, in the same envelope with my copy of Egg #1.

5 comments:

Hey, wow, thanks for the kind words, Jamie!! And I'm excited to see the promo for You Have Killed Me--I hadn't been aware of that, and now I'm looking forward to it. It looks very cool--maybe reminiscent of David Lapham's Murder Me Dead a little? (In a good way!)

For whatever reason, I never actually read Murder Me Dead. At some point I accidentally fell off the Stray Bullets train and never got back. I don't recall why. Maybe a misguided decision to "wait for the trade."

I can confirm that decision was indeed misguided--Stray Bullets might be my favorite series of all time! Murder Me Dead is a slightly different animal, though--much closer to a classic film noir vibe than the '70s-style nihlism of SB. But both are definitely worth your time.

Looking at this cover gallery (http://www.comicvine.com/stray-bullets/49-9584/), it looks like I read SB right up until the hiatus for Murder Me Dead. At the time, we were sharing comics at Oni, and I remember Joe Nozemack talking about Murder; maybe he never brought the comics back. As to why we didn't start picking up the title again, I still don't recall a reason. It wasn't because I didn't like it, quite the contrary. It probably was that the oversized hardcovers started coming out right after, and my intention was to get all of those. Oh, the plans of mice and men...

It's still shocking to me that those collections (and the series proper) don't sell well enough for Lapham to continue publishing them--is there no justice? When do the bailout checks for comics creators start rolling out?

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About Me

Author of prose novels and comic books like Cut My Hair, It Girl & the Atomics, You Have Killed Me, and 12 Reasons Why I Love Her. Jamie's most recent novel is the serialized book Bobby Pins and Mary Janes, and his most recent graphic novels are the sci-fi romance A Boy and a Girl with Natalie Nourigat; Madame Frankenstein with Megan Levens; and the weird crime comic Archer Coe & the Thousand Natural Shocks with Dan Christensen. He also co-created Lady Killer with Joëlle Jones.